GPS photography query

andyeverywhere · Occasional Visitor Joined: Feb 14, 2006 Posts: 1

Hi

Can anyone help me out here? I want to GPS control a cam corder such that it takes a picture every ten metres in a moving car..
Has anyone ideas on how to do this?
So far, I worked out that most of the action would take place on a computer running some kind of software such as Labview or Python. But does anyone have an idea which GPS and Camcorders could be used?

Any assistance appreciated

Andy

Darren · Posted: Tue Feb 14, 2006 5:27 pm Post subject:

As the camcorder will be connected to a PC then I would guess that the software could control the camera via Firewire or LANC?

Pretty much any NMEA standard GPS will suffice, but I'd guess either a GPS Mouse or a Bluetooth GPS would be best.
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Darren Griffin

mikealder · Posted: Tue Feb 14, 2006 6:39 pm Post subject:

If you are looking at using Labview you could program the application to run on a PDA with the correct software module, but it costs a fair bit, some educational establishments have the full application for student use, then for communication to trigger the camcorder use the IrDA if the camera supports this (my Cannon Camcorder does and Labview can record/ re-play the IrDA signal at will from the PDA, I actually use it for comms to and from generators). Watch the serial port reader in Labview relative to the GPS side of things as it can easily overfill the buffer leading to the position reported lagging the true position, I found this when I programed a simple NMEA parse in Labview for my XDA - Mike

Pocketgps · Posted: Tue Feb 14, 2006 8:10 pm Post subject: Re: GPS photography query

Mullet · Frequent Visitor Joined: Dec 12, 2005 Posts: 1051

A couple of things strike me. How accurate will your 10m be, when most consumer GPS receivers have a tolerence of several meters? My camcorder has a several second delay when hitting the capture button so how will this figure? If accuracy is not essential why not just run the camcorder continually then cut out frames with your movie editor software later?

Skippy · Posted: Wed Feb 15, 2006 12:42 am Post subject: Re: GPS photography query

Skippy · Posted: Wed Feb 15, 2006 1:14 am Post subject:

You could also have a look at Matlab. It's been around for years and is widely used by the scientific community but I don't know too much about it.

Also have a look at gphoto2 http://www.gphoto.org/doc/manual/ref-gphoto2-cli.html which might do the trick.
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Gone fishing!

Pc-Mobile · Posted: Wed Feb 15, 2006 11:00 am Post subject:

You have to ask yourself why do you need a GPS.

If you want also to recod the co-ordinate of where the picture is, that is OK.

If you merely want to take a picture every 10 metres or so from where you are, then there is no need for a GPS. A camera link to a PC (like USB camera) and to the speedometer with suitable sofware would be more appropriate.
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Pc-Mobile
http://pc-mobile.net/gps.htm

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